Remember Me Page 12
‘I see. But do you really think she could have killed him?’
Estelle finishes her cognac and waves to Jimmy for a refill. He stands up and fills her glass again.
‘You don’t want anything?’ Estelle asks.
‘Oh no, I have to drive back to the office and file my report about the inquest.’
‘Suit yourself. You could have stayed overnight if you wanted to.’ Estelle crinkles her eyes and smiles impishly.
‘I wish I could but I really have to get back. I just wanted to make sure you got home alright after that kind of a shock.’
‘It was a shock for sure.’
‘Have you eaten anything today?’
‘I’ll eat something later, unless you want to help me to cook something?’ Estelle swirls her finger round the top of her glass and then puts it in her mouth, looking at him. Jimmy reddens.
‘Why do you think Elizabeth would claim something like that?’
‘Lizzie hates her mother, always has. Maggie is a very pedestrian person, no imagination what so ever, no talent in anything, she even wanted Lizzie to study in Exeter! Who wants to study in Exeter? Lizzie is like her father, big ideas and very creative. Maggie wanted to stifle his career, wanted him to stay in Scotland, and didn’t want him to join her daddy’s firm, even though he was a brilliant lawyer. I know because Mr. Smithers told me so – I worked for Mr. Smithers, you see. Maggie’s brother, who is as dull as his sister, did everything he could to drive Eric out of the law firm.’
‘I see. But if Maggie has no training, how would she know enough to make “concoctions” as Lizzie claimed? Had Maggie learned about herbal medicines from Eric?’
‘I don’t know; I think he got into those years ago. Maggie could have learned about herbals and poisons from her own mother.’
‘Lizzie’s grandmother was herbalist?’
‘I don’t know what she was, a witch for all I know, I never met the woman. What Eric told me was that the day after Maggie and her brother turned eighteen, their mother just decided to pick up and leave and go to live in some commune in India to help cure the sick and the poor. Who knows what kind of cures she taught her daughter before she moved out. They didn’t even divorce, she just left. Who does that?’ Estelle flicks her head back. Her curls, which had been tied down, are starting to unravel.
‘I see.’ Jimmy looked at his watch. ‘I am sorry but I really have to go now. Are you sure you are going to be ok on your own?’
‘Yes I’m fine, unless – if I said I wasn’t, would you stay?’ Estelle looks at Jimmy deep in the eyes.
He has to pull himself away from her – he really did have to go back and get the inquest report filed. He had a fleeting thought that he could call in sick, but decided against it. This story was too good.
‘I do have to write the story. Would you happen to have a phone number for Lizzie? I would like to get my facts confirmed.’
‘I used to, let me see.’ Estelle gets her mobile, scrolls for a while and finds Lizzie’s phone number.
‘Thank you and I am truly sorry, but I do have to go.’ Jimmy walks towards the door. ‘No don’t get up, I can let myself out.’
Jimmy drives back to the office. That was some inquest, and some statement from Estelle. Wow. Guess Eric and Estelle had indeed been “bonding” before Eric’s divorce, just like the girl, Jennie, had claimed.
As soon as he gets to his office, Jimmy calls Lizzie who is more than willing to talk with him.
Jimmy also calls Maggie to get more info, but she refuses to talk with him. Jimmy plans to drive to Penzance on Friday.
DI Peter Greene and DC Terry Ford
After the inquest is adjourned, Peter Greene approaches Margaret Warner who is still sitting in her seat and looking rather shell-shocked. ‘In light of what your daughter said there, I think we need to talk, Mrs. Warner.’
‘Maggie, please, and yes I guess we do.’ Peter guides them to an empty office. Greene dispatches Terry to find Elizabeth who had run out of the building after her outburst.
‘How did Elizabeth find out about her father’s death?’
‘Apparently she had called Estelle that morning before she called me. Eric hadn’t shown up for their lunch the previous Friday and had not answered his mobile. So she calls Estelle, who tells her. Lizzie was totally devastated when she called me, as you probably heard.’
‘Where were they supposed to have lunch?’
‘In London, Lizzie shares a flat there with some friends. Eric and Lizzie have, sorry used to have, lunch together every other week. Lizzie has recently started at the university in London. She and I, for a long time, have had a very strained relationship, typical mother- daughter one, I suppose, but she absolutely adored her father.’
Greene asks her if she knew when and how Mr. Warner’s father had died. She says Eric’s father had died suddenly in January 1997, but of what she didn’t recall – it could have been a heart attack. Elizabeth was born in December. She’d been a very colicky baby, and had cried constantly for the first few months, and consequently Maggie had been scattered and spaced out due to lack of sleep. Eric had not got on well with his father, but had adored his mother who had died a couple of years ago.
Maggie keeps twisting her wrist to look at her watch. She finally asks apologetically if it would be ok for her to drive home as she has guests coming to stay at her B&B and she wants to be there in time to greet them. Greene agrees to come and see her on Thursday.
Ford catches up with Elizabeth outside the town hall where the inquest was held.
‘Hey, you can’t just throw a bomb like that and walk away you know, Elizabeth,’ he says.
‘Who are you?’
‘I’m Detective Constable Terry Ford, and we do need to talk. Let’s find a place where we can sit and talk for a bit.’
‘I don’t have to talk to you; I have nothing to say to you. You’re a detective; you should try to detect who killed my father.’
‘Indeed I am, and we are working on it, but since you just threw out that statement at the inquest, we are actually required to talk to you and you with us. So let’s just sit down over there and talk a bit. Otherwise I’ll have to bring you into the station.’
‘Ok, I guess I don’t have a choice,’ she says grudgingly. They sit down on a bench in the small park by the town hall.
‘How old are you really, Elizabeth?’
‘I’m eighteen, or I will be in a few months.’
‘Where do you live? I need to know how to contact you if we need to ask more questions.’
‘I’m living in London, sharing a flat with some friends.’
Terry digs up his notebook and writes down her phone number and address.
‘Now, can you tell me why you think your mother poisoned your father?’
‘She hates him! She only sees him as a moneybag, and since they divorced, he has been giving her tons of money, which she just throws away in all these wacky deals. She has no business sense at all! My father was a brilliant man, he…’ She starts to sob.
Ford fishes out a pack of paper handkerchiefs from his pocket and gives them to her.
‘I do miss him so much.’ She blows her nose.
‘So tell me how you think your mother would have killed your father, and when would she have done that?’
‘My mother knows all about herbal concoctions. She’s the one who got my father into taking them. She always has a bad smelling brew on the stove.’
‘Where is this?’
‘She lives in Penzance. She cooks all that stuff in a shed there. Doesn’t want to poison her guests, although there’s fewer and fewer of them – I guess it’s possible she got to them too.’
‘You do realize it is a very grave accusation to blame someone for murder?’
‘But she did it, I’m sure she did! Oh God, I got to run, I have to catch that bus to get back to London.’ She wipes her nose again and sprints to the other side of the street where a bus is approaching.
Terry is left standing with a pen in his hand.
Thursday 29th of May
The Abbey Chronicle, page 3
My mother murdered my dad!
Inquests are generally not very exciting events. The coroner interviews police and others, the verdict is pronounced, it’s all very routine and rarely anything out of the ordinary happens. Yesterday’s inquest concerning the death of Mr. Eric Warner, the man found deceased in the Tersel Woods on May twelfth, followed the usual pattern until nearly the end. The police and home office pathologist had given the typical evidence – no clear cause of death, more tests needed. The wife, who in these unexplained cases is usually the first suspect, had testified regarding her whereabouts at the time of her husband’s death – she had been in the Scilly Isles. The coroner was just about to announce his verdict, when a young woman bounces up and starts shouting that he was murdered. “Don’t you see, he was murdered!”
The person shouting was Ms. Elizabeth Warner, the dead man’s daughter, and the person she accused of murdering her father was Mrs. Warner. Elizabeth Warner claimed her father had been poisoned, not by Mrs. Estelle Warner, but by Mrs. Margaret Warner, Elizabeth Warner’s own mother, who was also attending the inquest. Due to the daughter’s statements, the inquest was adjourned to give the detectives more time to investigate the unexplained death of Mr. Warner.
What we know so far: Eric Warner, who according to the pathologist, police and his own wife was in excellent health, died on May twelfth. According to the pathologist, there were no injuries on him and there didn’t appear to be any reason for him to die. Mr. Warner was a moderately wealthy lawyer with properties in Faukon Abbey as well as Exeter. He played squash. According to the police, he was known to take herbal and other alternative medicines.
On the day of Mr. Warner’s death, Mrs. Estelle Warner was on the Scilly Isles, while Ms. Elizabeth Warner was in London. According to what this paper has been told, Margaret Warner was not at her home in Penzance on the twelfth of May. Her whereabouts on that fateful day remain unconfirmed at this time. We have also been told that Mrs. Margaret Warner is an accomplished herbalist. Mr. Warner was known to state to his daughter and others how plants could both cure and kill.
We have been unable to reach Mrs. Margaret Warner for comment on this story. The Faukon Abbey detectives also refused to comment.
DI Peter Greene and DC Terry Ford
Greene comes in to the office carrying his coffee cup and clearly fuming.
‘Did you talk with your pal at the Chronicle, James what’s-his-name? Have you seen this?’ Greene throws The Abbey Chronicle on Ford’s desk, pointing to the article about the inquest.
‘No sir, I haven’t talked with him.’
‘Did he call you and ask to comment?’
‘No sir. Let me check my mobile. Maybe he called late last night and left a voicemail.’ Ford dials and indeed there’s a message from Jimmy at eleven o’clock asking Terry to call him. ‘All I have from him is that he wanted to talk, nothing about commenting on anything, sir.’
‘Ok, well when he calls the next time, tell him to call me. His reporting is interfering with our investigation. How did he know about property in Exeter? And making those kind of comments about Maggie – they’re definitely inflammatory.’
‘Very good sir.’
‘Let’s get on with it all then, let’s find out who killed Eric Warner. Have we found the witness yet?’
‘No sir, the uniforms were asked to keep an eye on someone matching the description. However, the witness seems to be nowhere to be found. The good news is that I have finally received both the phone and bank records for Mr. and Mrs. Warner. I’d just started to review them when you came in.’
‘Good, keep at it.’
As he hasn’t heard back from Slater, Greene calls him. Slater is apologetic; a vasectomy is not checked for in post-mortem, and since the body has been released, he has no way of finding out about it either. It is possible Warner could have had one, but as there was no scarring, there was no reason to delve deeper. As most vasectomies are done as microsurgery these days, there are usually no scars to be found. Greene thanks him and turns to Ford.
‘Estelle Warner has been proclaiming every time we’ve met her that she and her husband moved here to start a family, right? She even mentioned it during the inquest. However, according to Holmes, Warner’s doc in London, Warner had recently asked him about a vasectomy. Unfortunately, Slater is unable to confirm whether Eric Warner had the vasectomy or not. It’s not part of a regular post-mortem apparently, and since the body has been released, he has no way of checking it.’
‘Maybe Warner told Estelle about it, or she found out somehow, and that’s why they had a fight and she took off to the Scillies?’
‘What do you mean they had a fight?’
‘Pratt told me.’ Ford finds his notebook. ‘She had heard them fight about a week before Estelle went to the Scillies. According to her, Estelle had yelled and screamed something like “If you didn’t want to have children, why did you want to move here?” and then stormed upstairs. He’d eventually followed. Pratt had not heard anything more after that. A few days later Estelle stated she was going to go to the Scillies.’
‘Really? Keep checking up on those phone records and bank records. If Warner had it done, he most likely had it done privately. Can’t see him walking into an NHS clinic and asking for it, can you? If he had the vasectomy done, he must have paid for it somehow, most likely with a credit card. He didn’t go to Dr. Holmes for it. We need to know when or if it was done, and by whom.’
‘I’ll see what I can find.’
‘Good, I’ll drive to Penzance to find out if Maggie Warner knew about it and what she and Lizzie knew about Eric’s habit of using alternative medicines. Also, we still don’t know where Maggie Warner was when her former husband died.’
‘Indeed, sir. Would you like me to come as well?
‘No, you’d better keep digging in those records.’
Greene drives to Penzance again. The weather had turned cloudy. This time Maggie takes him to a small office next to the lounge and they sit down.
‘What can you tell me about your former husband, Eric, please?’
Maggie starts to haltingly tell how Eric had been a charmer when they had first met. He’d taken her out, made her laugh – he was funny and had a great sense of humor. She had fallen for him, badly. The marriage was ok for the first four years, but then went south.
‘It was a shotgun marriage’ Maggie says. ‘I had become pregnant with Elizabeth, noticed it too late to do anything about it, and Eric decided --or rather his parents had decided-- that we should get married before the baby was born. I was not sure if I really wanted to be married to him, but since there was a baby on the way, I assumed it was in the baby’s best interest to have both mother and father. I was sure as anything that I wasn’t prepared to take care of the baby on my own. So we got married, and too many years later we divorced.’
‘Years later, after the divorce, I had started to think more about why exactly I had married him. My mother and I used to watch old movies on TV, I loved watching them. But since my parents’ marriage wasn’t exactly a good example of a loving marriage, I got all my ideas about love from those old movies.’ Maggie smiles wistfully. ‘What can I say, I’m an incurable romantic. I also was very naïve, inexperienced, and assumed life and love was supposed to be like that.’
‘How you do you mean?’ asks Peter.
‘There are four kinds of love, at least according to Hollywood,’ Maggie smiles. ‘Love is like what Spencer Tracey says to Katherine Hepburn in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. There’s that scene near the end where he looks at her and tells his daughter what love is. The way Spencer Tracy looks at Katherine Hepburn said so much about mutual love, respect and a yearning to be together. The second type of love is like the one between Burton and Taylor. Theirs was based on burning desire, the “can't live with and can’t live without” kind. You ca
n see it in his eyes in the movie Cleopatra, that scene near the end where they are talking about sending his ships to battle. You can see how much he loves her and wants her and how he hates himself for loving and wanting her so much, because loving her makes him feel weak and the odd thing is, she feels the same way. The third kind of love is based on solid friendship, like in When Harry Met Sally. Their kind of love was actually the long-term kind; they were friends, they knew each other in and out. They loved each other and liked being with each other, not much burning desire but solidity, always knowing the other one would be there, always someone having your back no matter what. I think Harry says something like, "Once you know you want to spend the rest of your life with someone, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.” And then the fourth type of love is like the one between Rhett Butler and Scarlett in Gone with the Wind, where he falls for her but is way too scared to admit it to himself because he doesn’t feel he’s good enough for her, so he does this whole play-acting thing with her, no honesty or trust on either side. In each of these there was love, at least according to Hollywood –in my marriage, not so much.’ Maggie smiles wistfully.
‘What about you? Are you married?’ she asks.